abstract: The study of American national parks provides invaluable insights into American intellectual, cultural, and sociopolitical trends. As very popular tourist attractions, parks are also depicted in art, film, television, books, calendars, posters, and a multitude of other print and visual media. National parks therefore exist both physically and in the American imagination. Comparing Yosemite National Park, one of the oldest and most popular national parks, to Mineral King, California, a relatively unknown and far less-visited region in Sequoia National Park, unveils the deep complexity of the national park idea. From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, the visual and written representations of each area, including art, photographs, advertisements, and government publications, evolved and shifted, sometimes rapidly and paradoxically, depending upon the aims and needs of historic societies. The power of imagery and production of knowledge to influence visitation, management, and land designation is revealed through this comparative study. Park representation and interpretation in the cultural consciousness, moreover, uncovers how societies perceive and, thus, will ultimately use certain environments. A place cannot truly become a national space until it is viewed and valued as such in the American imagination. The creation of cultural material, especially visual works, is vital for forming and sustaining national park narratives. Popular parks like Yosemite need to have their legacies reinforced, and lesser-known units, such as Mineral King, deserve the chance to have a cultural legacy created—thereby helping to ensure that both remain for future generations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2019

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture images and academia. This project consists of three sections. The first focuses on the trajectories of negative representations of college professors in popular American films from 1970-2016. The second examines interview responses of film professors to on-screen depictions of college faculty. The third presents a case study of professorial depictions by a group of filmmakers who created a feature length film about a college professor. As various public stakeholders are increasingly questioning the role of the college professor and the institution of higher education, this project seeks to examine the influence of popular professor images and cultural influences on the conceptions of two interpretive communities – one that embodies the professoriate and one that creates images surrounding it. Moreover, this project considers these depictions within film marketplace and popular culture contexts.

In 2008, Spain’s financial crisis had a great impact on the primary sector on which the nation’s ‘economic miracle’ was founded: housing.Land speculation, the increase in housing construction, and easy loans had become one of the hallmarks of twenty-first-century Spanish identity. The crisis del ladrillo (“brick crisis”) plunged the national economy into chaos and condemned many Spanish citizens to job insecurity, loss of earning power, threat of eviction, and put them at high risk of social marginalization. This dissertation studies the unusual proliferation of documentary films during the years surrounding this economic downturn about the ghettoization of the Spanish Gypsy population; a marginalization that was also indebted to the earlier economic development policies of the Franco regime and continued as Spain entered more fully into the free market in the late 1950s. As a result of Spain’s global socioeconomic exclusion due to the housing crisis, however, the Spanish Gypsy emerged in documentary film as a social actor who represented a reality that was no longer exclusive to the Other, but common to all. This project consists of a detailed analysis of three documentary films: Polígono Sur: el arte de Las Tres Mil (2002), Can Tunis (2006)and Una casa para Bernarda Alba (2011), all of which attempt to reconstruct national identity in an age of financial downturnthrough a shared emphasis on the spaces of exclusion experienced by gitanos (Gypsies). Informed by spatial theory, post-colonial studies, critical discourse analysis and theories of representation of the Other in film, the purpose of this research is to unveil the dialectical negotiation that is established between neoliberal discourse, economic crisis, and the experience of its victims (both Gypsies and non-Gypsies) in spaces of shared conflict: shanty towns, slums and housing projects. The findings of this dissertation are twofold: that the appropriation of the Gypsy population’s experiences by these documentaries reflects and at times continues legacies of internal colonization while, simultaneously, these films point the way toward representational strategies that open the door to the narratives of those who have been silenced under neoliberalism.

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

Academic work dealing with the overlap between video games and female representation is limited in both volume and proper research. Most texts agree on three supposed flaws with video games: they alienate female participants, there are no games for female players, and female players cannot relate to female characters. This thesis sheds light on these points, not only citing specific counter-examples, but also showing how many of these issues reflect on a larger societal problems.

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In 2012, the Entertainment Software Association announced that 47% of all game players are women. Before this statistic came out, it wasn't a surprise that girl gamers existed but the fact that this supposed 'minority' almost shared equal parts with the majority was used as a catalyst for the types of gaming environments we have today where females are faced with sexism, patriarchy, and other various forms of prejudice. This, in turn has initiated both positive and negative discourse and has perpetuated social change in the video game community. This is my response...

This thesis examines Spanish representations of Muslim and Jewish cultures in Morocco during the colonial campaigns in the Rif (1909-1927) in relation to constructions of Spanish identity during this period. It focuses on visual and textual narratives in the press (colonial photojournalism) and on three literary texts: Carmen de Burgos' En la guerra (1909), Ernesto Giménez Caballero's Notas marruecas de un soldado (1923) and Arturo Barea's La ruta (1943). The analysis undertaken centres on the use of the motifs of the body and the city and references to the medieval Castilian ballad tradition, the Romancero, by writers and photographers to explore the cultural relationship between Spain and North Africa. The chapters explore the delineation of boundaries between Spanish and Moroccan cultures by contemporary commentators and the power structures that underpin those boundaries, considering the different hierarchies that are established in Spain's relationship with Moroccan Muslims and Jews. Chapter 1 concerns the socio-historical context of the colonial campaigns and highlights the significance of the question of Spain's identity in relation to Morocco during this period. Chapter 2 compares representations of cultural and ethnic affinity between Spain and Morocco, arguing that beyond merely serving as a tool of colonial domination, they are harnessed in some cases to support the colonial venture, in others to challenge it, and yet in others to explore the pre-modern origins of the Spanish nation. In many of the examples examined, a process of self-Orientalisation is observed, where the 'Orientalist' and colonialist gaze is turned back on Spain as well as on Morocco. Chapter 3 examines representations of Muslim and Jewish alterity, arguing that these assertions of difference reveal Spanish anxieties about non-difference from North Africa, cultural regression, national fragmentation, and Spain's ability to dominate the protectorate. I conclude that these anxieties provide the fundamental underpinning to Spanish constructions of Morocco during the Rif War, and that this self-awareness about non-difference and failures of domination unsettles the predominant paradigm of discourse analysis within colonial studies.

Dans le cadre des actuels débats autour du rôle et des pouvoirs des images, notre étude explore, à la lumière de la recherche du philosophe Michel Foucault, l'étendue et les fonctionnements discontinus, et parfois conflictuels, des rapports entre visibilités et pratiques d'images. La première partie de notre travail analyse le rôle des descriptions et évocations picturales des ouvrages du philosophe que l'on peut associer à l'analyse archéologique, s'attachant à montrer la singularité du rapport entre les images et l'émergence historique de différentes « modalités de voir» dans leurs articulations aux pratiques discursives. À l'appui des textes et manuscrits simultanés ou immédiatement successifs à l'élaboration de L'archéologie du savoir, la deuxième partie de la recherche valorise les défis que la question du traitement du visible et des images a lancés à la mise en place d'un champ de cohérence pour l'analyse discursive. Avec une attention particulière portée aux cours inédits sur la peinture du Quattrocento et aux projets sur la peinture de Manet, l'étude retrace les tentatives du philosophe vouées à considérer les dispositions culturelles de la visibilité et les configurations historiques de la présentation visuelle comme des dimensions articulées historiquement par des modalités différentes. La troisième partie analyse, enfin, les expérimentations foucaldiennes concernant des pratiques de l'image, présentant, à partir des conditions d'émergence de la notion d'attitude critique, les enjeux politiques de la réflexion autour des rapports entre visibilité et modernité picturale. / In the framework of the present ongoing debates about the role and power of images, our work aims to explore the extent and the discontinuous characterizing the historical relations between visibilities and practices of images in the light of the research of the philosopher Michel Foucault. The first part analyzes the role of descriptions and pictorial evocations in Foucault's works which can be associated with archaeological analysis; its objective is to show the singular relation between images and the historical emergence of different “modalities of seeing” in their articulations with discursive practices. Thanks to the analysis of texts and unedited manuscripts on painting, the second part points out the discrepancies between the visual dimension of Foucauldian research and the methodological elaboration of the archaeological discourse, with its claim to disclose a field of coherence for the discursive analysis. In light of the debates between art history's methodology and philosophy in France at the time, our analysis presents this apparently marginal section of the research of Foucault as an attempt to consider the cultural dispositions of visibility and the historical configurations of visual presentation as differently articulated through historical modalities. The third part analyzes various Foucauldian experiments concerning image practices. Through the study of archival material, the political stakes of the Foucauldian reflection about pictorial modernity through the emergence of the notion of critique as attitude are presented.

How to Be A Model Minority: Mastering the American Dream is a satirical instructional manual which teaches readers to be idealized Chinese Americans in order to integrate into American society. The booklet bases its standards off of the model minority myth, a conception of Asian Americans which assumes Asian Americans must repress their Asian heritage and embrace overachievement to attain the socioeconomic status of a middle class white American family. Through color illustrations, photos, and short expository texts, the booklet explains to readers how and why they should accept the standards of the model minority myth, and uses Asian American characters in popular television and movies as references. How to Be a Model Minority humorously deconstructs the model minority myth by exaggerating the expectations the myth places on Asian, particularly Chinese, Americans. This exaggeration allows the reader to question the validity of model minority expectations and the groups truly benefitting from these imposed standards. By examining media representations of Asian Americans, the booklet also suggests the role popular media has in disseminating cultural information.